Why Microsoft isn’t “scared”

Chrome OS and Microsoft target very different audiences (regarding computing). True, Microsoft was able to capture a large portion of the low-end internet user audience by default but Microsoft’s true target is businesses and those who need connectivity with their business offerings. The Chrome OS, as advertised, is for the light internet user. When I say light, I am not describing time. They use email, they connect to social sites, they browse the web, etc.

What about the millions of people who make videos, put them on their computers, use video editing software to edit them, then upload them – retaining a copy on their computer? What about pictures you take with your phone or digital camera? Most people store them on a computer. How many people blog and keep a copy of databases on their computer in case of disk failure?

And let’s not forget the people who play video games. Console gaming is fun but there are some games that do not play well on a console. Considering the number of good games coming to the PC, Microsoft does not have to worry about web-only computers. They have other concerns they should focus on.

So, what will happen?

Usually people purchase computers based on what they want to do with them and the price of the computer. The cost of computers dropped to the point almost anyone can afford one. The real question: if you have two computers, one doing significantly more than the other for slightly more money, which would you pick? The Chrome OS is perfect for kids, for example, but eventually most kids will want to do more with their computer than browse the web and check email.

But more important, the wise person does not keep everything online. The lazy person won’t think about the implications of everything being stored online until it is too late. A person serious about their online data has multiple backups, perhaps online and on their hard drive for the blog, email, videos, pictures, etc. If the data is important then it should be treated as such. How many horror stories does one have to read about someone losing everything because taking precautions to ensure it does not happen to you as well?

There is a clear market for this type of computer. I will most likely pick up one for travel if the price is right. It is a security precaution to travel with a computer that doesn’t have important data on it. It also seems like a good computer for beginners. There is a niche for Chrome OS…

That does not mean that those who purchase a Chrome OS computer won’t have a PC, Mac or another computer with an OS that does more. There isn’t much difference between the Chrome OS computer description and smart phones, is there?

Written by: Tyme White | Follow Tyme on Twitter | Be Friends on Facebook

Remove a site from Google? What? Noooo!!!!

The interview was posted on YouTube on 11/6/09. People lost their minds about it 11/9/09. I was amused then I became irritated at the silliness of people rants. A couple of A-List bloggers said Murdoch was foolish for removing content from Google and the drone followers sang the same tune, in a crescendo harmony that became highly annoying. They called Murdoch an idiot, a moron, stupid…a long list of names.

We shall ignore the people making these claims not having shit or accomplished shit compared to Murdoch. Just sayin’….

Have you ever searched Google (or any search engine) looking for content, think you found a good article, click over and find that it is a premium article you need to pay for? Did you pay or did you go back to the search engine and find another article? Most people do not pay. The site has subscribers so they do not rely on search engine traffic. They have other marketing methods to secure paying customers.

If one were to do the math on how much it costs to provide free content versus how much it costs to have premium content, the costs might be more in line for premium content. Traffic might be less but it is quality traffic, people who like the site enough to pay for the content. The people paying are their true target audience, which is much easier to provide content for.

So what’s the problem?

People don’t know when to shut up

It is ironic that one of the things people say they love about America is freedom of choice. Yet, when one tries to use their freedom of choice, they are criticized for it. Murdoch has a very good point: all content should not be free. That is a ridiculous assumption. Do you like to work for free? No? Why? You need money? Really? Companies need to make money to pay employees. Go figure…and you’d think the people criticizing Murdoch volunteered their services to their employer every day.

Yes, search engines send a lot significant traffic to NewsCorp sites, but so does Digg. The Digg Effect will bring you a ton of traffic, eating up a ton of bandwidth, but most of those visitors do not stay. Let’s also consider that if NewsCorp decided to charge for content they would be attempting to reach a completely different audience, using different marketing strategies, etc. They would have a smaller target audience, less expenses and not necessarily less income.

Newspapers are hurting. Wise business people try to avoid problems prior to them affecting them. Electronic newspapers are fine. I have no problem paying for services I use. The target audience they are attempting to reach would not have a problem paying for content.

Let’s be real: If the decision is made to make NewsCorp articles premium content, will the world come to an end? No. If you don’t want to pay, you’ll find the content elsewhere. You might whine for a little bit but life will continue because one of the beautiful things about the news: it is everywhere. Even if other newspapers follow suit and become premium content only, there are other sources for news – like TV stations putting news online for free.

And Murdoch is smart enough to know that.

Written by: Tyme White | Follow Tyme on Twitter | Be Friends on Facebook

• Working on Argent Tournament.
• Working towards a Netherwing Drake.
• Doing daily quests…daily.
• Working on the Explorer/Loremaster achievements.
• This week is Children’s Week.
• Just found out Dark Moon Faire started yesterday.
• Working on Sons of Hordir reputation.

There are a zillion other things to do in game that I have not begun to do. For example, while leveling to 80 I leveled so quickly (yes people, I said quickly) this happened:

I play a level 80 Death Knight and there are entire zones I have not seen:

• All the lower zones under level 55 (Death Knights start at 55).
• Obviously I missed at lot of Outlands (see the screenshot?).
• I haven’t seen all of Northrend (especially as new things are adding).

I’m definitely getting my monies worth.

With so much to do, along with balancing life and business responsibilities, one has to have the mindset everything cannot be accomplished at once.

RSS vs. Twitter

Reading Dare’s article today about how RSS readers are like email clients I couldn’t help but laugh because it is all about the person’s frame of mind.

When it comes to blogs and other casual content, this model breaks down. I really don’t need a constant nagging reminder that I haven’t read the half dozen reposts of the same tech news stories about Google, Twitter and Facebook after I’ve seen the first one. Furthermore, if I haven’t fired up my reader in a while then I don’t care to be nagged about all the stuff I missed since they are just blogs so it is OK if I never read them.

Simple solution: mark them read and continue on with your day. Better solution – unsubscribe to the feeds you never really read. Unless someone’s job revolves around RSS (for example, someone with a web site covering technology and the news he/she writes about comes via RSS) the unread items do not have to be read. Just like all tweets do not have to be read. Just like I don’t have to complete every activity in World of Warcraft. Or go to every party on Saturday night. Or keep in touch with every person I met over the years.

See the pattern? As always it boils down to freedom of choice. To get the news on Twitter as efficiently in RSS one has to either:

• Make a group to separate the “news” from friends and pray the “news” people only tweet about news.
• Keep Twitter open 24/7.

And let’s be real about the Twitter being efficient. Retweeting is the most inefficient way of spreading news. The people retweeting mean well and it is wonderful they share their finds. However, the odds of receiving the same news article multiple times on Twitter is much higher than in RSS.

Most people miss the majority of tweets they have access to and do not feel guilty if they miss the tweets – even from friends and loved ones. Add the same carefree attitude to RSS and the problem is solved.

Don’t let your frame of mind limit you.

Just like Stryker did in the movie. Look how crazy he was.

What is a Conflict of Interest?

Wikipedia has a good definition:

More generally, conflict of interests can be defined as any situation in which an individual or corporation (either private or governmental) is in a position to exploit a professional or official capacity in some way for their personal or corporate benefit.

Here are some examples of conflict of interest from the same article:

• Self-dealing, in which public and private interests collide, for example issues involving privately held business interests.
• Outside employment, in which the interests of one job contradict another,
• Family interests, in which a spouse, child, or other close relative is employed (or applies for employment) or where goods or services are purchased from such a relative or a firm controlled by a relative. For this reason, many employment applications ask if one is related to a current employee. If this is the case, the relative could then recuse from any hiring decisions.
• Gifts from friends who also do business with the person receiving the gifts. (Such gifts may include non-tangible things of value such as transportation and lodging.)

Now that we have a basic definition let’s get back to Stryker. In the movie, Stryker is a religious fanatic. He killed his wife and mutant son (not shown in the movie) because he felt the birth of his mutant son was a sign from God to destroy mutants. Stryker, holding military positions, had a conflict of interest. His desire to kill mutants over-shadowed everything and was fueled by the positions he had in the military – giving him power to do things outside normal realms.

That’s Easy to See But What About This?

Ok, Stryker is an over-the-top example of conflict of interest. Easy to see, right? Ok, let’s try a more subtle example.

Alan meets a girl (Crystal) and he thinks she’s really cool. He’d like to get to know her better and of course, have sex with her. Crystal thinks Alan is okay and would like to get to know him better to see if he’s boyfriend material. Crystal decides to Google Alan…and she finds his MySpace and Facebook profiles. She sends a friends request, which Alan accepts because he “can’t” say no and still want to get to know her (without angering her) can he?

Crystal looks at the MySpace page and notices there is a woman with the first top left friend slot. She looks at the comments and sees the same woman making comments that imply they are a couple, or dating seriously. Next, she goes to Facebook. The MySpace girl isn’t a friend on Facebook but there is another woman posting comments daily. Crystal knows what that means because she’s done it herself. She looks at both profiles and the relationship status is Single. Crystal becomes angry because she specifically asked Alan if he was single and he said yes.

Next time Alan called her, Crystal asked about the two women. Alan said nothing was going on, they were just friends…and implied Crystal was “tripping” (he is single…he’s not married). While he explained Crystal was looking at the two profiles, looking at what the women said, and thinking Alan must think she’s stupid.

See the conflict of interest? In case you don’t…Alan desire to get to know Crystal better overruled being honest so Crystal can trust him. She called him out and he continued to lie.

Conflict Of Interest Takes You Down the Wrong Path

Stryker’s desire to kill mutants took him down the horrible path of killing and destroying innocent people. Alan’s conflict of interest caused him to lie to a girl that might have been “wifey” material. You can always tell a conflict of interest…

… because the person won’t let it go.

No matter how many people tried to reason with Stryker, he wouldn’t discontinue his mission. Alan, when confronted with his situation, continued to lie about it. In both cases, it’s end-game. To “stop” Stryker would have to give up his military position and reform. If Alan wants any type of relationship with Crystal those girls need to disappear – not hide from view – disappear.

What Alan doesn’t realize is that as long as those two other women are around it is a reminder he lied to Crystal. They were important enough to lie about. How can Crystal forgive him for lying if the women he lied about are still around? Hiding them from view isn’t good enough because when they reappear, unless he blows them off, it reminds Crystal again he lied to her. If Crystal is important, he’d remove the one girl from the top friend slot (if she’s not his girl she shouldn’t be there in the first place), set things straight with both women (ie: blow them off cause they have different agendas) and never put himself in that position again.

How often does a single guy do that? Let’s say almost never and move on…

Spotting the Conflicts….

The more efficient you become spotting conflicts of interest, the more time you’ll save wasting your time on people who are in direct conflict with what you want to achieve. Stryker wasn’t trying to help anyone, he was trying to destroy mutants. Anyone siding with him thinking in the end good would prevail was wasting their time. Crystal, looking for boyfriend material, was obviously looking in the wrong direction at Alan. In Crystal’s case, she spotted it quick and if she walks away the time she’ll waste trying get to know Alan (while he gets it together) she could be spending on a man that already has it together. No one is perfect but lying is not a trait one should look for in the person they want to get involved with. In life, we’ll always be confronted with conflicts of interest…the strong people remove themselves from them because they realize, in the end, it won’t work.

You can’t “win” with someone that has a conflict of interest because pleasing themselves overrules doing what is right.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine: The Quick Review

The movie was good, definitely geared towards people not familiar with the comic. For those unfamiliar the movie has unexpected twists and turns where the balance of action/story is more balanced. For those familiar with the story (like myself) you might walk away wishing their was more action. They did a decent job staying true to the original story lines. I enjoyed it and I recommend going to see it.

Does Your Theme Cut Content Off?

If you have a blog take a look at your front page. Do your entries stop after X number of words or characters? If they don’t, you might want to read this article about optimizing your site. If your entries are cut off after X number of words or characters, does the cut off happen when the reader will have a good indication of what the article is about? Is the formatting for the article maintained?

What normally happens is the writer installs the theme and doesn’t think about when the text is cut off. Often the text showing doesn’t match the title of the article. For example, if someone tells a story as an example to use in the article later the story might distract the reader from clicking even if the title is interesting.

Why Write Excerpts?

Take a look at the front page on my site. With this theme I have two options on how to create excerpts. I can use the more tag and it will cut off the text where I want it to or I can write an excerpt. I opted to write an excerpt so the text on the front page and in search results are different than in the actual article. For me this works because I write the excerpt first and the pre-written excerpt helps me stay on topic while writing my entry.

The dual benefit of cleaning up my front page by using excerpts: I cleaned up my search results as well. Readers searching my site will have a easier time finding the material they want. Another extra added benefit is that I will not receive the duplicate content penalty from Google.

Let’s Keep it Real….

I didn’t always use excerpts on my site. I just started using them. Did I go back through hundreds of articles to write excerpts? No. Maybe when I’m doing something tedious on my computer (like flying from one area to another in World of Warcraft) I’ll clean the past entries up and write excerpts. Instead what I did was make a couple pages excerpt friendly and made the conscious effort to do better in the future.

Let me be clear here: if you set a goal too high for yourself the “chore” will become too much of a burden and you will not enjoy your blog/site as much. Your lack of enjoyment will show in your writing eventually. Take small steps even if it is one entry at a time.

Objectivity is Important

Being able to detach yourself emotionally from your writing and take an objective look at your site is crucial to understanding the reader’s browsing experience. If you are unable to do it, ask a neutral person their thoughts. Someone that will not feel guilty about telling you something potentially negative about your blog/site.

If you see things on your own site that you do not tolerate while browsing the internet, change it.

Fred’s latest idea is a last.fm scrobble effect for blogs:

The only blogs I read every day are my wife, daughter, and brother

Everything else is based on links I see on the web

I wish there was a last.fm for blogs

A last.fm for blogs! I want to scrobble my blogreading and publish it as a blog roll on AVC.

If you aren’t familiar with last.fm, the software will track and publish the music you listen to. You can embed your listening choices on your site. The software allows you to customize your listening choices. You can turn it off and listen to music in private. You can select directories that cannot be scrobbled for additional privacy. You can select the software which last.fm interacts with. One important note is if you start listening to a song you can skip it and it won’t appear in your listings (you have to listen to a song for a good length of time for it to appear publicly). In other words, there are choices for the user.

Now Let’s Look at Why Fred’s Idea is Stupid

Do you REALLY want software tracking every site you visit and publishing it to your blog? Let’s think about this a minute.

1. The software would have to determine which sites are okay to publish and which ones aren’t. It would be dumb to publish sites like where someone banks, when they check email or login to a mobile service, etc.
2. Next, the software would have to be maintained to filter the things you simply don’t want seen. For example, when you went to Amazon to look for a gift for your spouse.
3. And let’s not forget the things people might not want known period – can you say porn?
4. For the list to be meaningful then it needs to be “good”. If you surf the internet you encounter crap…things that aren’t worth mentioning or you strongly disagree with. Those would need to be filtered out.
5. With short URLs you don’t know where you’re going until you get there. It would be dumb to auto-publish from short URLs.
6. Oh, let’s not forget about the content that might offend people. For example, I posted something on Twitter today but I also made a note about the profanity. With this auto-publishing Fred wants…that wouldn’t happen.
7. Oops…let’s not forget sites that are valuable resources but most likely not ones you’d want on a blogroll list. Like the dictionary. Google searches. Wikipedia. Need I go on?
8. And we won’t even get into how awful this would be for kids (or people who aren’t technology wizards by nature). Or the security risks of using something that, in real-time, publishes the site you just visited.
9. I know, I know, this scrobble list is only supposed to be for blogs. What’s the definition of a blog that everyone agrees on?

Take all of that out of the equation you get back to recommending something. And you know where that leads you right? To the services that are already out there like Shared Items for Google Reader or StumbledUpon for those not wanting to use a reader (use the browser addon).

All Ideas Aren’t Good Ideas

It’s great to share ideas and get feedback on them. Fred’s ideas seem to stem from making things “easier” for him to the point of dumbing down brain activity. Take a look at his blog and see how much time he spends correcting misconceptions about different news items that eventually impact his startups (you know, like negativity about the economy). Fred must not surf the internet much because, if he did, he’d realize the implications of real-time scrobbling and how it would end up being more trouble than it’s worth filtering out what you don’t want to appear on a blog. He even contradicts himself. He doesn’t want to create a list (as in RSS feeds) yet this application would have to have a white or blacklist.

The Beauty of the Internet: Power of Choice

That’s one of the beautiful traits of the internet – the ability to pick what you want to see, what you don’t want to see, express what you want to say, and interact with whom you want to interact with (or not). To some, Fred’s ideas are visionary. To me, I feel like I am getting dumber as I read his site. I don’t want to fall into that trap of having everything done for me. I don’t want to be one of those that blindly follow someone when they, in the interest of making things easier for themselves, suggest an application that adds more noise to the internet, creating almost no added benefit, that isn’t being done already in a more efficient manner.

Laziness doesn’t get you anywhere. And we wonder why the economy is messed up? We have people like him in charge of distributing the money to companies. If this is the type of ideas they are funding…yeah, my mind won’t even go there.

In the End….

I guess I miss the Fred I was used to reading from a couple of years ago. The one that came up with innovative ideas that added value, was the catalyst to evolving trends, that pushed boundaries. Compare this to the “I want to scrobble everything because I’m lazy” entry. See the difference? But even then, his opinion about tagging wasn’t neutral as his VC has a vested interest in Delicious, which is one of the sites the tagging craze started from.

And now that I typed that, I’m not sure I trust his opinion(s) anymore and that in itself makes me sad.

Earlier this year I had a conversation with Tyme White about twitter and personal branding that had stuck in my head ever since I got off the phone with her. She brought up the fact that I had a lot of twitter followers but where or how would I stay connected with those followers if twitter goes down (fail whale) , twitter gets purchased by google & closed like Pownce or their business model just doesn’t work and everyone leaves the community. We talked about how some people who I admire like Robert Scoble and Gary Vaynerchuck have huge online followers despite twitter. Robert has a large following and readership on his blog before twitter and the same for @GaryVee but we do know they both have used twitter to extend their brand.

Towards the end of his article he disclosed his plan on how to extend his blog. Everyone will take a different approach and should do what makes them feel comfortable. However some thought should be given about how what you do today impacts you tomorrow.

It is easy to build a Twitter audience (Facebook, MySpace…you get the idea). It is much easier than a blog because the tools are there to quickly send friend requests – which most people accept. Send out enough you’ll have people subscribed to your content. However, how many of those people are actually reading or are interested in what you are saying? It is common for people to only read what Twitter displays the moment they log on…they don’t scroll back to see what they missed. Same thing goes for a blog. Just because your FeedBurner stats state you have X subscribers doesn’t mean all of them actually read your content. Just because you have X amount of subscribers to your blog doesn’t mean everyone subscribed actually reads your articles.

That doesn’t mean people shouldn’t use third party services. They can be a great compliment to your site. However, if you have more subscribers to a third party site than you do your own site that might work against you in the long run. If those sites ever went out of business, blocked access to your profile (who often does that happen on Facebook?) or even worse had technical difficulties and lost your friends list what would you do? How screwed would you be?

Another problem is overextending yourself. If you are spread out amongst too many services it makes it very hard for people to follow you – to catch all of your content. Imagine telling your readers go to Facebook for this, MySpace for this, my blog for his, Twitter for that. I had a profile on Pownce but it is gone, update your records. My work record is on LinkedIn, I have Yahoo, AIM, MSN, ICQ and Skype – add me! See what I mean? It’s information overload on one person. Add more people and the odds are they aren’t tuning in as you’d like them to.

With my own audience I don’t put anything in between us. It’s me and them. That’s how we roll. For me, it works out. Sure, we drive each other crazy sometimes but I know they are reading what I say. Not necessarily expressing their honest opinion (we’re working on that) but they are reading and interacting with me. Not via Twitter or anywhere else but my site, my email, my IM…me.

I answered Wayne’s question in the comments section of his article. Head on over if you want to take a peek. Remember – social media sites are tools. Use them wisely.

1. Making an emotional decision – “Jack shouldn’t have broken up with me. You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to make him jealous through Facebook!” or “OMG I just saw this cool pink/red/purple/orange and bright yellow theme with blinking links! And it has a widget built in so the music plays automatically and my pictures will float across the page! I’m installing this RIGHT NOW!”
2. Thinking a decision is a good one if people agree with the decision – “I want to start a blog but I’m not sure if I should (but after asking some friends Jill decides to do it” or “I really like Jack but my friends wouldn’t approve – so I won’t accept the date with him”.
3. Trying to find out every detail (and sometimes this is impossible) before making a decision – “I like Jill but I don’t want to be rejected so I won’t say anything until I know exactly how she feels about me…but I can’t ask her because then she’d know I like her” or “I want to start a blog about politics but I want it to be #1 – what is my competition? Google lists 1,237,448 blogs but is that all of them? Which ones are the best ones? All the lists have the blogs in a different order…I can’t start my blog and make it #1 without knowing my competition.”
4. Repeating the same mistake from not learning from the past or from other people’s experiences – “Wow, I read Dooce was fired because of what she wrote about her co-workers and her job on her blog. Let me write about my co-workers – that would be funny!” or “We broke up, got back together, broke up and got back together, we argue and we have different goals in life but the sex is so easy, why end it?”

In each case I took an online and relationship example as a basis so anyone can relate to the pitfalls. They all potentially (most likely) lead to negative outcomes. So how do you make good decisions?

1. Stay away from the option that leans towards the greedy or selfish person in you.
2. Look at all aspects of the situation – look at the pros and cons.
3. Trust your instincts.
4. When it comes to your life, it’s best you live it as you see fit. Your decision might not make sense to someone else.

Most important – everyone makes mistakes. Learn from it and move on – don’t beat yourself up over it or repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

*Quote in title by Albert Camus

When I first visited the site my eyes bounced around the page following all the orange links and images. As you can see from the screenshot there is a large sign up box at the top of the page. This screams to me that they really want people to sign up since the box is taking up quite a bit of prime real estate on their front page. Very soon I understood why and it is the reason why I decided to write the article. Once you sign up the sign up area turns into this:

After signing up, things started to make sense. As you can see from the screenshot there are variety of options for the user. Groups, Contacts, Multimedia, Bookmarks, Feeds, Newsletters, Blog, Events, Networks, Recommendations. When you sign up they ask for your title, making it very clear this is for business purposes. It even says so on the front page before you sign up. So I ask you…

Why would I put images, video, audio and documents on their social site? Don’t people go there for information? Why would I create a network there, put my events there, and heaven help me, why would I blog there? And they have a widget for their blogs…so I can place their blog entries on my own site? I looked around their groups. One of their featured groups, Technology, was created on in January, has 109 members…and 10 comments of which I could only view 2 for some reason. Fast Company is not Facebook.

Recommendations and Bookmarks are great ideas. They focus on the content, which should be their focus. Their niche person is the business person, who probably has social network accounts elsewhere. There isn’t a reason to join this network and do what the person is already doing elsewhere.

Then they do the thing I detest the most. When you subscribe to a feed it automatically adds it to their internal feed reader. I was unable to subscribe to the feeds I tested in FeedDemon, Google Reader or Bloglines. There are some pages that have RSS buttons right next to a Subscribe button. One link works in a browser; one requires a login (going into their internal feed reader). Excuse me but both options are subscribe methods, correct? When you subscribe to an entry, the user is shown a message that the RSS feed has been placed in their feed reader. I promise you it didn’t go in my feed reader (FeedDemon). I looked in My Feeds and guess what I found:

How did SPAM get in my feed reader? My Feeds has 683 things I didn’t subscribe to! And guess what? I don’t see a way to delete all 683 of these items I didn’t ask for. I can mark them read but I cannot delete them…that I can see.

And please don’t get me started on the half descriptions for articles on their front page. If you look at the image above you will see they use a cut-off method instead of a more professional summary method like ArsTechnica or cNet. You know so the reader has an idea what the article is about.

Miserable effort Fast Company. Miserable. I hope you put more thought into your video network. What do I know? I’m not the designer of The Triad. Maybe people enjoy being forced to read feeds on a site instead of their feed reader and, when they go to read the feed, are bombarded with 683 spam (new member, remember that) rendering it almost impossible to find the article I subscribed to. Yeah…what do I know?

http://tymesaid.com" rel="me"
http://yoscrivs.com" rel="co-worker"
http://domain.com" rel="sweetheart"
http://www.diaryofawebsite.com/" rel="friend"


The process is automatically performed when Google’s spider crawls a site. If one would like to clearly define sites and relationships, the owner of the site can use XFN or FOAF to describe relationships linked on a site. A relationship can be removed by removing the link from the site. Google’s spider will pick up the change the next crawl. The individual can submit for a re-crawl if he/she does not want to wait for the next crawl. This YouTube presentation by Brad Fitzpatrick explains the API in more detail.

The one thing I like about this API: the relationships are starting to have meaning. As we talked about in the last 3by9 podcast, most social networks give equal weight to “friendships”. If social networks implement this API then perhaps they will adopt levels of friendship to allow multiple forms of communication with friends.

One caveat that came to mind: just because I am friends with someone on MySpace doesn’t mean I necessarily want them following me on Twitter as they are different services with different goals (one might use one for professional reasons and the other for personal). In Brad’s presentation he mentioned finding a connection between profiles with completely different names (oopsies if the person did not want the connection known). Because of this, I would strongly suggest deleting old profiles and 3rd party blogs in the event those companies decide to participate.

Keep in mind normal links do not count, so I decided to play around and see what I would find for 9rules for “me” links. The following results came up:

lutrov.com
pownce.com/9rules
twitter.com/scrivs
flickr.com/photos/34943008@N00
randomconnections.com

Pownce, Twitter and Flickr are valid. I raised an eyebrow on Lutrov and Random Connections. Here is what I found in the source code for Lutrov:

http://9rules.com/" rel="me" title="Highlighting the very best web content in the world, and packaging it in a nice bow for you to unwrap."

This is what I found on Random Connections:

http://9rules.com" rel="me" title="This is one guy's collection of websites, all extolling the virtues of CSS and standards compliance. He is also the founder of Moveabletype.org, great guru of weblogs. Sections of particular interest are Whitespace and the CSS Vault."

Who knew Scrivs started MovableType? Note the “me” links are the only ones Google picked up as the guys and I do link to 9rules on our sites. Perhaps the generous use of “me” links are automatically generated by the software they are using, who knows? You might want to check and see who is claiming to be you.

Interesting approach. It will be interesting to see if this catches on.